Syrians find calm after carnage

Refugee children outside a building housing displaced Syrians in the Turkish border town of Hacipasa.

Story highlights

A Turkish border town is dealing with an influx of refugees escaping Syria

Some refugees find shelter with friends and relatives; others in a warehouse

Hacipasa mayor says they have seen little international aid

Refugees say that after a tough journey out of Syria, they feel abandoned by international community

Umm Isham, a 34-year-old housewife, lost her husband five months ago to a blast from a Syrian tank, and had her house near Damascus leveled by a bomb. Her two sons, 11 and 12, will grow up without their father.

She tried to stay in her country but recently decided to seek safety in Turkey, crossing the border illegally, with little money and few clothes. She had arrived in Hacipasa just four hours earlier, with the ankles of her jeans still wet and muddy from crossing the Orontes river that divides the Turkish border town from northwestern Syria.

The regime is "shelling houses and killing people along the way. It's not safe to send your son anywhere because a sniper might be shooting. Nobody is safe. What kind of regime is killing its own people?" she asked.

Umm Isham, who asked that she only be identified by her nickname, and her two children are among the latest of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have fled the intense civil war that has raged for almost two years.

In December, the U.N. called for $1.1 billion for externally displaced Syrians' humanitarian needs, but only 18 percent of the appeal has been funded, according to a briefing by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees on Tuesday.

Life when fleeing everything – In the Bab al-Salam camp on the Syrian-Turkish border, Syrian refugees try to carry on their lives through the bitter winter. Muhammad Zafir, 13, steps inside the hole he dug with two of his friends: a bomb shelter they have made for children.

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Life when fleeing everything – Nour, 8, from the town of Azaz, arrived a few days ago at the refugee camp.

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Life when fleeing everything – Abo Ahmad lit up plastics for warmth with his child.

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Life when fleeing everything – Muhammad Yousef, 14, holds his 1-year-old sister, Rama, as he heats water for his mother to wash clothes.

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Life when fleeing everything – Syrian refugees number about 200 families and growing in this camp, huddled around plastic tents that work as temporary shelter during summer but will do little to protect them from the frost of winter.

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Life when fleeing everything – A general view of the Bab al-Salam refugee camp on the Syrian-Turkish border on Tuesday, January 1. Turkey, which supports the insurgency, is housing about 150,000 Syrian refugees at camps near the border.

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Life when fleeing everything – A Syrian family erects their tent at the Bab al-Salam refugee camp January 1.

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Life when fleeing everything – A woman stands at the entrance of her family's living area in a refugee camp named Container City on the Turkish-Syrian border, near Oncupinar in Turkey's Kilis province, on Monday, December 24.

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Life when fleeing everything – A man whiles away the time in Container City on December 24.

As the war has dragged on with brutal street fighting and air attacks by the Syrian military, many civilians have been killed or injured.

Refugees in Hacipasa say they feel abandoned by the international community. According to the town's mayor, while some Turkish groups are helping Syrian refugees, only one international group, a German aid organization, is currently in the town. UNHCR says it is working with the Turkish government to help support Syrian refugees.

"What is so urgent now is heating devices [for the winter cold], the basic food people need, especially flour, to make bread and other basic stuff like milk for children. This is so urgent. They need many things," the mayor explained.

He then went to Darkush, Syria, but left again because of bombing, ending up in Hacipasa two months ago with his brother Tahsan, 23, an economics student. Both men occasionally find odd jobs when locals need men to carry shipments from one place to another or farmers need workers to harvest olives.

They have lost some friends and two cousins in the war and want to return home but say they will stay in Turkey until it's safe in Syria and the fighting has subsided.

"If we don't get support, it could be eight months or a year until the rebels win. It's up to the will of God. But if the international community decides to help Syria and establish a no-fly zone, toppling the regime would happen much more quickly," says Hasan, 26.

Syrian children mingled around a building that houses around 100 refugees under tarps. They played with each other and made "V" signs while chanting "The people want the fall of the regime" to a reporter.

Farah, which means "Joy" in Arabic, is a 15 year-old girl from Darkush, Syria, who has been in Hacipasa off-and-on for a year.

She says that because she participated in demonstrations and her father was known as an anti-Assad activist who is now an FSA fighter, she was kicked out of her school.

Sectarian divisions in Syria, she says, were even present in school exams with Alawite teachers helping Alawite students cheat on their tests to get into better high schools.

"The soldiers came and went inside my school and they went inside the school and since that time, nobody went to school. We were afraid," she says softly.

She misses her hobbies of knitting and painting and longs to see her friends who have fled to different Turkish towns.

"All the time I am so worried about my father. I always think about people on the other side because I hear bombing and shelling. I don't want to be selfish and forget them... I am safe maybe but I am not happy at all because I had to leave my own country and I always worry about people, my family and my father."